Geographies: CO

So the message has spread and every city, community, school and hospital is wanting to be smarter. The challenge? Boots on the ground, ideas combining and prototypes to innovate from. It seems the technology is all here, much is even free and cloud accessible. The future is here, it’s just patches. Our goal is to grow, combine and extend these patches into viable startups – businesses, social enterprises, products, services or just pure genius innovation.

The answer? Startup Weekend where we will give the tools, the skills, the coaching and combining of ideas and the deployment of real innovation by exaptation.

The 2016 Winners

Join us at the Third Denver Startup Weekend where we get serious about working on innovation.

To widen the focus from simply being another pitch fest, we are looking to give awards for innovation, team collaboration, technology mastery, adaptation and design. So your work will be augmented by crucial advice, designs and patterns will be clarified, documented, tested and critiqued by some of the industry’s best minds. We want your go to market proposition to be strong, scalable and resilient.

Breckenridge Startup Weekend would like to thank all our amazing sponsors!

Join us Thursday, October 27th from 6pm-7:30pm at Watershed School (1661 Alpine Ave. Boulder, CO) for the official kick off to Startup Weekend Boulder Youth! Keynote speaker, Mohit Mukherjee, VP of Programs at Watson University, will be kicking the evening off with information and inspiration to get you ready for Startup Weekend Boulder Youth happening November 5-6 at Black Lab Sports in Boulder!

Mohit Mukherjee founded the Centre for Executive Education at the U.N. mandated University for Peach in Costa Rica, worked in for-profit, nonprofit, academia, and as a social intra-preneur, launched Changemakers International, an organization enabling youth to gain the skills to become social innovators, authored a handbook for young social entrepreneurs, lived in nine countries in three continents and studied Industrial Engineering at Stanford University and did his Master’s at Harvard School of Education.

The evening will also consist of a round of instruction highlighting what the pitch process will look like during the first morning of Startup Weekend as well as tips and techniques on best practices when pitching.

Pizza and refreshments will be served, please RSVP to Event Organizer, Sheri Replane (sheri@watershedschool.org). Parents of attendees are welcome to join too!

For more details and to register for Startup Weekend Boulder Youth please visit: http://www.up.co/communities/usa/boulder/startup-weekend/9981.

You’ve heard of Startup Weekend: local events put on to bring together ideas, teams and resources to make great things happen. Now, think bigger.

This November, attendees of Think BIG! Startup Weekend Boulder will connect with local entrepreneurs and mentors, but they’ll also be part of a larger scale event.

Global Startup Weekend (GSW) is an initiative celebrating entrepreneurs and startup communities around the world.

The startup community will hold over 200+ events over a 2-week timespan. Winners of each local events will be featured globally, get exclusive content and get access to resources to continue their growth.

This is a rare opportunity with the best of both local and global access to resources and support. So what are you waiting for? Sign up for Think BIG! Startup Weekend Boulder today.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

From the first time, the organizers of Think BIG! Startup Weekend Bouldergot together and agreed that helping participants connect with potential co-founders, mentors and the greater Boulder startup community was of utmost importance.

Ideas are great, but we all know the importance of a strong team in making things come to life. So at Think BIG! Startup Weekend Boulder, you’ll connect and work with other smart, passionate people en route to developing the best idea you can.

This approach of putting individuals together to see how well they work together is one Jesse Lawrence knows well. He runs his own PlaySpaces associated with his Startup Studio Boulder BITS. PlaySpaces brings together teams to work on pre-validated ideas from concept to pitch. For Jesse, the ideas are the easy part: the magic is in pulling together a great team that can bring it to life. Prior to starting Boulder BITS, Jesse was a professor at Stanford University and has been involved with several startups ranging from video technology to human safety and connected (IOT) devices.

Jesse is just one of the many great mentors you’ll meet at Think BIG! Startup Weekend Boulder Nov 11–13, 2016. [Note: Boulder BITS is also a sponsor of the event.]

A few weeks back, I asked a local front-end developer and aspiring entrepreneur why he’d never attended a Startup Weekend. His response? He could stay at home and work on a project himself for free. Which is true. If you just want to create a proof of concept, you don’t need Startup Weekend.

But if you want to want more: if you want to connect with some really-freaking-smart, passionate people and start a company, you can’t go at it alone. Come join us.

You have something to share, be it passion, curiosity or a great idea. Everyone who attends has something incredible to offer. We can’t wait to work on something together.

But prior to this historic event, was a 3-4 month planning process. For anyone that has not organized any type of an event in years, well, this was an experience. I can only say this on my behalf (Keith). With the help and experience of qualified individuals, we had set up a critical and amazing team that led to the success of this event.. First steps, beside getting everyone involved in the communication channels (Slack, Google Drive, Asana, Hangouts, etc), was communicating with the Denver community. We needed to show our community why their involvement was so important in implementing a successful Startup Weekend. And this we did. Focusing on Denver communities that ranged from companies involved with hardware, software, legal, solar, marketing, branding, logistics, and everything in between, we succeeded in establishing quality and invested sponsors, including the support from the city we live in, the Office of Economic Development. Little by little, sponsors were onboarding, and the community was being educated on what Startup Weekend is and what it provides to the individuals that attend. And without realizing it, this event was making a difference in our lives too (2016 Startup Weekend Denver Committee).

While sponsorship was being addressed, we all knew we had to involve the community even more. We were able to confirm 14 coaches and mentors, each with specific expertise, 5 extremely credible judges, and 3 keynote speakers that can only be described as present visionaries and legends.

Okay. Now the tough part. Forecasting, budgeting, logistics, food, marketing, supplies, etc. Of course there were headaches with all of these, but we all survived. I need to emphasize the food part here. Have you ever been to an event where you just see an abundance of food and you know so much of it will be thrown away? Kind of heart wrenching since you know there are so many others that would love to have it. Mattison, who was responsible for this endeavor really did an amazing job. There was such little waste and what food was left over, was donated to the Salvation Army. I tip my hat to anyone that is ever involved with organizing food for any event.

All in all, the planning process of our event was amazing, with some glitches of course. I think every single person that was involved in our event gained new friends, new insights on industries they were not personally or professionally involved in, and reflected on themselves and their community in a deeper way because of the event.

Friday night after registration, dinner and networking, Matthew Bailey inspired us with a captivating speech on the potentials for the Internet of Things. Following Matthew’s presentation came the time for people to pitch their ideas. Over 30 people pitched an idea. After those were voted down to the seven that were worked on for the weekend, it came time for those founders to build their teams. Teams built, projects started, it’s Startup Weekend go time. Teams continued to build late into the night.

Saturday morning comes and teams trickle in to continue to work. Around 10:00 am, Gene Rittenhouse gives a detailed presentation about Nordic Semiconductors as well as providing information about the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52 DK – Development kit for nRF52832 board that each team received with which to prototype their projects.https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Bluetooth-Smart-Bluetooth-low-energy/nRF52-DK

Much work and many mentor sessions consumed most of the day. Later that evening at around 7:30 we were inspired by a great speech from Tom Higley, the founder of 101010. The moral of the story, prototyping with hardware is all fun and games, but in the end you need to ask yourself something. SO WHAT? What is the point of your product or company and what problem are you solving.

Sunday came on way too fast. Team scrambled to prototype, validate and develop their pitches. More mentors came to assist in the afternoon with answering a wide array of business and technical questions. Three pm was the Presentation Prep & Tech Check and then dinner.

Final presentations were inspiring from all the teams.

1st Place – Grandma’s Favorite

The Colorado IoT (Internet of Things) startup community includes two organizations. The first one is the IoT Colorado Meetup group which was founded on March 1st, 2013. The second and newer community is the TechrIoT community.

A heartfelt thank you to EVERYONE who was involved in making this event a success!

Hi everyone, my name is Marc. I recently moved to Telluride this year and have been doing as much as I can in my spare time to help build the startup community here. It continues to amaze me how many amazingly talented people are working on great things here already…. and no one ever knew it! It turns out you can live in a small mountain town, enjoy the amazing quality of life it offers, and solve real problems in the world!

I’m teaming up with Scot Ennis, another recent transplant to put on Startup Next. This is a “pre accelerator” program that I helped create about 4 years ago, and has been hosted over 120 times over 40 cities around the world. We believe that this program will be an amazing complement to the Telluride Venture Accelerator program and will target companies that might be slightly earlier stage.

We’re in the process of assembling a world class mentor list and recruiting some great teams. If you join us, we’ll build an incredible cohort of teams working on companies based in Telluride (that serve markets beyond just our amazing little box canyon).

If you’re working on something cool and could use a little help or know someone who is, have them apply now! Please don’t hesitate to reach out and ask any questions or join us at the upcoming Telluride Entrepreneurs Meetup on December 10th at the Hub…. oh yeah, check out the Telluride.me site too and give us any feedback!

What did you do this weekend? About 20 people spent their weekend in Frisco, Colo. launching six new business ideas. They pitched their ideas formed teams, validated ideas, crunched numbers, conducted market research and then presented 54 hours later to a panel of judges including leaders from IBM, COIN (Colorado Innovation Network) and successful Colorado startups.

“It’s an intense weekend,” says Larry Sullivan, lead organizer for Summit County Startup Weekend. “We had 15 ideas pitched on Friday night. From there, six teams were formed and in typical entrepreneurial style, things shifted and pivoted. One team switched ideas. All of the teams learned a tremendous amount. It’s a crash course in entrepreneurship.”

Startup Weekend is a global phenomenon with 2,900 events hosted in 150 countries. Summit County’s third Startup Weekend was held Nov. 13-15 at ELEVATE coSPACE and EVO3 Workspace – two coworking spaces in Frisco, Colo. – and was part of Global Startup Battle, the largest startup competition in the universe. More than 70 people attended the public pitch events on Friday and Sunday nights in Frisco, Colo. for Summit County Startup Weekend.

The winners were:

Native X, a travel itinerary planning app using artificial intelligence, won first place for Summit County Startup Weekend. The team was comprised of Brenden Coleman, Bonnie Spalding and Patrick Mackintosh.

Elite Altitude Performance, a business that will provide high-altitude triathlon and cycling training camps, took second place lead by elite athletes Nadiya Mitelman and Nick Frey.

Fish Conserve, a program that uses crowd-sourced data for fish and river conservation captured third place. Shamus Lahman and Katherine Roth were the Fish Conserve team.

Elite Altitude Performance also won the crowd favorite award. All three teams are entered into the Global Startup Battle and will compete with other newly launched startups and businesses around the world.

According to IBM’s Alisa DeMartino, one of the judges, it was a tough decision. She felt as all three of the top teams had disruptive ideas. NativX stood out because they had a strong management team with vision, a disruptive product and a solid, strong business model and financial plan.

“The spirit of startups is strong here,” DeMartino says. “We’ll see a ton more out of the mountains as innovators have an incubator environment to thrive. It’s a work/life balance, innovators are starting to see they can be in Summit!’

Startup Weekend was launched right here in Colorado to give entrepreneurs the motivation, the support and the resources to take their business from idea to prototype to full business plan in 54 hours.

The Startup Weekend organizing team is planning another event in 2016. If you’re interested in getting involved, please contact: summitcounty@startupweekend.org.

A packed house kicked off Summit County Startup Weekend on Friday the 13th in Frisco, Colo.

Six teams formed to tackle issues such as trip planning, triathlon training, customer support, reusing skis, life coaching and fish conservation. The teams are:

Remakers Space

Elite Altitude Performance

Nativ X

Support Buffer

ULifeCoach

Fish Conserve

The teams are working to validate their ideas, build their business model and create their business plans. They’ll pitch to a panel of judges on Sunday night. And the top three winners will be entered into the Global Startup Battle champions track.

In just 54 hours, you can turn your idea into a business. That might seem crazy but several Summit County businesses have already been launched in one weekend.

How? It’s called Startup Weekend and was launched in Colorado to give entrepreneurs the motivation, the support and the resources to take their business from idea to prototype to full business plan in 54 hours.

Now, it’s your chance. Summit County Startup Weekend returns Nov. 13-15 to Frisco, Colo. and will be based out of ELEVATE coSPACE and Evo3 Workspace, two coworking spaces in downtown Frisco.

“So many times people have ideas but are too afraid to share it … As you learn in Start-up weekend, ideas are plentiful, implementation and taking action is a whole lot more work,” says Shawna Henderson, founder of Adrenaline Escapes, who won last spring’s Startup Weekend. “If there is something inside of you that you can not get out of your head, take the first step and pitch it. You never know where that will lead.”

Henderson was one of the five teams who pitched at the April Summit County Startup Weekend. All five teams are still working on their businesses and projects.

“We’re helping to build a launch businesses and ideas in Summit County,” said Larry Sullivan, lead organizer for Summit County Startup Weekend. “We had a 100 percent success rate of Startup Weekend teams. That’s an unusually high number and speaks volumes about the passion, tenacity and drive of our community.”

Startup Weekend gives anyone –- like Shawna and her team – the opportunity to pitch an idea on Friday night in 60 seconds or less to a group of local executives, entrepreneurs, designers, developers, founders, startups, digital experts and students.

After a vote, teams form around the top ideas and then they launch into 54 hours of creating, designing, researching, analyzing, developing, coding and teamwork all to present to a panel of expert judges and local startup veterans. Prizes will be awarded to help the teams put their ideas into action and build a startup.

Even if you don’t have an idea or don’t want to pitch, come, says Sullivan. If you’re intrigued with the idea of a startup or want to support a startup idea, this is the right event for you to attend.

According to Sullivan, Friday night and Sunday night are the perfect time and opportunity to find out more. “Who knows,” he says, “you might come on Friday night and get inspired to pitch an idea or join a team.”